


Revelation of the Laundry

by thetransgirlwhoneverwas



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: DWFicExchange20, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:02:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25382029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetransgirlwhoneverwas/pseuds/thetransgirlwhoneverwas
Summary: Amy Pond and a mysterious blonde woman who seems to recognise her are embroiled in a conspiracy and discover what really happens to all those odd socks that go missing the laundry...
Comments: 2
Kudos: 28
Collections: DW Exchange 2020





	Revelation of the Laundry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FictionPenned](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/gifts).



Amy Pond’s washing machine was broken. This had only been discovered when she and her husband had tried to wash a rather large pile of laundry they had been ignoring for entirely too long and found that the distressingly loud gurgling sound of the washing machine was just a little bit out of tune with how it usually sounded, seconds before it had dumped water all over their floor.

Amy Pond’s washing machine was broken. They had tried to call someone to fix it or tell them if it needed to be replaced, but because this had happened on a Saturday they wouldn’t have been available until the Monday, but then the person called to repair it didn’t arrive despite claiming to have rung the doorbell, and the next available slot wasn’t for three weeks and the laundry pile had kept growing, and Amy and Rory were nearly out of socks to wear.

Amy Pond’s washing machine was broken. So now, Amy Pond (technically Williams, but both she and Rory considered both of their surnames entirely interchangeable) was at a launderette, trying to wash her clothes and hoping that the other people around her didn’t recognise her from the adverts she had been in a couple of years ago, as she was not in a mood to be recognised by anyone.

Amy fumbled with the settings on the ancient washing machine she had only managed to shove half of her clothes into for fear of breaking two washing machines in as many weeks, looking through the load of clothes she had put into it, convinced that there had been at least a couple more socks in there. As her mind wandered, she furtively glanced around at the other people in the building, idly looking for anything more interesting than her current task. Nobody looked back, all far too busy on their own tasks, which Amy thought was perfectly normal and was glad that - wait, had the person looked back?

Yes, Amy thought, that woman in the corner with the blonde hair that almost reached her shoulders had met her glance and then quickly looked away again, looking far more suspicious than she had any right to. Amy turned back to her own task, but cautiously peered into the reflection of the washing machine beside her, which thankfully gave her a perfectly clear view of the woman who kept stealing what she probably thought were subtle glances in Amy’s direction, but which Amy would describe as “whopping great stares at me”. Amy at first thought the woman was a fan, someone who recognised her from all the adverts she hadn’t done in a while, but then she got a good look at what she was wearing. Something about the long grey coat, completely mismatched shirt, suspenders, and blue trousers that didn’t quite reach told a clear story of someone who hadn’t been outside recently enough to have seen Amy’s adverts.

For the briefest of seconds Amy’s mind was cast back unprompted to an old friend of hers who dressed probably even more eccentrically, with a particular fondness for wearing a lot of tweed. She smiled at the memory of the friend she hadn’t seen in entirely too long, then shook it off, unsure of what had brought the memory up. She returned to her laundry, occasionally sneaking glances at the woman that were infinitely more subtle than the glances she received back.

“A-HA!” the mysterious woman shouted some minutes later, making Amy jump out of the somewhat bored trance she hadn’t realised she was in. “Gotcha now, you-oh, oh that’s not the best sign!”

Amy set subtlety aside and looked over to the woman, who appeared to have put her arm, head, and half of her torso inside the washing machine: deeper inside the washing machine than the washing machine was deep, in fact.

“Um, can I get a hand from someone please?” the muffled echo came from inside the machine. “Um, from anyone, please?”

Amy looked around to see that the launderette was empty apart from her and the strange woman. Whether they had all left beforehand or had run away at the sight of a strangely dressed woman being pulled into a washing machine was unclear, but Amy also decided she didn’t really care as she rushed over to try to pull the woman back out.

“I’ve got you,” Amy said as she grabbed the woman around the waist and tried to keep her from being pulled into the hole she now saw had opened up in the back of the machine. She couldn’t see what was inside, or what was pulling the strange woman in, but she stood on her toes for a second to get a look behind the washing machine and saw that not only was it standing a few centimetres away from the wall, but the wall behind it had no such gaping hole in it. Any regular person would have considered this entirely impossible and wondered whether this hallucination had been caused by that cheese they’d eaten last night that was just a couple too many days out of date, but Amy had had plenty of experience with things that were bigger on the inside than they were on the outside and, having spent so long around one such particular thing that her conscious mind had forgotten that it wasn’t normal, didn’t even question it.

“Thanks Amy!” the woman said in response to the help, and Amy was so interested in what the hole was doing there and what was inside it she didn’t think to question how the woman knew her name either.

“Any idea how-ah!” Amy stopped her questions as she felt another tug on the woman, almost dropping her, and tightened her grip around her new friend, whose feet were now off the floor and her head halfway down the hole in the back of the machine. Amy kept her grip around her waist and tried pulling backwards, but to no avail: whatever was pulling her inside the machine was far stronger than her.

“I don’t know what the hole is!” the woman shouted a response to the question Amy hadn’t had a chance to ask, almost as if she knew before Amy had asked what it was going to be. “I was just here washing some of my spare outfits since the washing machine in the TAR-um, my caravan stopped working because I put too many marbles in it!” Her northern accent echoed from the hole that was almost entirely in as Amy ducked her head down to avoid hitting it on the top of the inside of the machine.

“Why did you put marbles in a washing machine?” was the wrong question to be asking at this moment, but it was the question Amy asked regardless.

“They got dirty after I put them in dirt!” the woman protested as if that was a winning defence. “I needed to-oh dear!”

“Needed to what?” Amy asked, but didn’t get an answer until the most forceful pull of them all dragged her feet off of the ground and both she and her new friend tumbled headfirst into the hole at the back of the washing machine. As they fell for several minutes down a chute that twisted and turned far too often to be comfortable, Amy was vaguely aware that the woman was saying something - a lot of things, in fact - but she wasn’t listening to any of it because she was far too busy screaming in a mix of surprise, fear, and though she’d never admit it, excitement. She used to do this sort of nonsense all the time with her old friend, and oh had she missed it.

After entirely too much falling to be comfortable, Amy and the strange woman were deposited at the bottom of the chute into a room that looked far too advanced and futuristic to belong inside the back of a washing machine. Amy looked around to see fancy machines with blinking lights surrounding them. She took a deep breath after her fall and the gulp of odd-smelling air made her head spin a little and her mind swim. She felt odd: not unpleasantly so, but different than normal.

The other woman stood up with a bounce and shook her head, hair flying in every direction before settling back down on her head. She took a deep breath like Amy, but reeled back from it.

“Woo, that’s stronger than I expected,” she said, before reaching into her coat and pulling out a small tub that didn’t look like it should be able to fit in the lining. She opened the lid and retrieved a small red pill that she swallowed, shaking her head a little again afterwards and sticking her tongue out in mild disgust.

“Here,” she said, handing one to Amy, and she took it and swallowed it without question or hesitation. The woman had been right: it tasted awful, like honeyed mackerel wrapped in an old sock. As soon as she did, however, her head cleared up and she suddenly asked herself why in the world she had just accepted and swallowed a strange pill given to her by a woman she had only met ten minutes ago.

“You smell that?” the woman again answered the question Amy hadn’t asked, lifting up her nose and sniffing the air again, her face scrunching up as she took another deep breath of the nasty air. “Fabrisofonium in the air. Mind control agent. Subtle, but effective. Not very nice. I made something to counteract it, but I haven’t figured out how to make it taste like toffee like I wanted yet.”

The way she said that, the utter confidence in the absolute nonsense she was spouting, put Amy in mind of her old friend in the tweed again. She kept thinking about him since meeting this woman, but before she had a chance to reason why, another voice rang across the room. It sounded like it should have boomed throughout the room and hit Amy straight to her core, but instead it sounded like a mouse speaking into a megaphone.

“You dare enter our lair?” the squeak demanded in a manner that was clearly supposed to be far more intimidating than it was. Amy suppressed a giggle. The other woman did not.

“Not much of a lair, is it?” Amy said back in a much more impressive voice, despite not knowing where the failed boom was coming from. “I’m sure there’s less impressive places to set up than in the bottom of a washing machine but I can’t think of many.”

“She’s not wrong,” the other woman agreed. “Was this really the only place you could come up with?”

“Could you not afford the rent anywhere else?” Amy continued their mockery, spurned on by the support of her new friend.

“Silence!” the voice attempted, but the utter lack of grandeur in the voice failed to impose anything on them.

“Oh, make me,” Amy dismissed and took another look around now that her head was clear. The room was still filled with blinking lights, but most of the lights didn’t appear to be blinking to indicate anything, just trying to look impressive and advanced. She did, however, see on one side of the room a conveyor belt, and on said conveyor belt she spotted a couple of familiar items.

“Hey!” she demanded of the disembodied voice. “Over there, on that conveyor! Are those my socks? Did you steal my socks?”

She considered her own question for a moment. “Why of all things to steal did you steal my _socks_?”

The woman’s face scrunched again in an expression of utter bafflement and she started to ask “why would they steal your socks?” but when she looked at where Amy was pointing she too saw what Amy had seen: a conveyor belt taking up a decent portion of the room, feeding an endless supply of odd socks into a strange machine that, unlike everything else in the room, appeared to actually be doing something: namely, coming out of the other side of the machine was a less frequent but still constant stream of the most garish and poorly stitched together beanie hats Amy had ever seen. While all of the colours were amazingly vibrant, every single hat she saw coming out of the device somehow managed to clash with itself. She couldn’t imagine anyone wearing one. That was a lie, she realised: she could absolutely see her old friend with the tweed wearing one.

“...I can’t quite believe I’m saying this but yeah, they’ve stolen your socks Amy,” the woman confirmed, and Amy was still too caught up in what was happening to question how she knew her name. “Why have you been stealing socks? How long have you been stealing socks?”

The tiny voice laughed. “Foolish humans!”

“Not human, but whatever,” the woman muttered under her breath, but Amy heard it. Not human? She started to put the pieces together in her head.

“We have been taking these garments from right under your noses for years, and none of you pathetic creatures ever noticed they had gone!” the voice continued.

“We noticed,” Amy argued. “Trust me, we all noticed.”

The voice ignored her. “We will use these garments to create new garments, but our ones will be infused with our fabrisofonium! We will sell these stylish and colourful garments, and everyone in the world will wear them!”

“You’re joking, right?” Amy asked, incredulous at the idea. “Nobody in the world would wear one of those things willingly!”

“I would,” her new friend admitted quietly, raising her hand, but putting it down again after a mildly sarcastic glare from Amy.

The voice continued to obstinately ignore her poking holes in it’s argument. “Once everyone in the world is wearing our mind controlling hats, we will have complete control over your world! We will use you pathetic humans as our army to take the rest of the galaxy! Nobody will ever be able to stop us! We Laundrians will take over the entire universe, and you cannot stop us! We are just hours away from having enough garments to fulfil our plans! Nothing can defeat us now!”

“Because that’s going to be a fearsome sight,” the woman jeered at the voice. “An army of humans wearing silly hats, an infinite wave of purple and yellow as far as the eye can see. You lot wouldn’t be conquerors! You’d be a laughing stock!”

“The species that took the world using funny hats,” Amy continued, winking at her new friend, somehow completely failing to be intimidated by the prospect of badly made hats taking over the world. “Literally nobody is ever going to take you seriously! And that’s assuming you get anywhere with step one, I can’t imagine anyone I know being _paid_ to wear one of those things.”

“You...you wouldn’t?” the voice faltered into an even more tinny squeak, before building itself back up again as big and powerful as it possibly could, a sound that made Amy laugh out loud again. “Enough, humans! You are just trying to trick us! You cannot stop us, and we will take your planet!”

“The Washing Machine Overlords!” Amy laughed and her new friend wheezed at the name. Neither of them could keep from laughing at this point, not even listening to the objections of the voice that squeaked insistently at them and went ignored.

“The Stealers of the Sock!” the woman suggested and Amy roared with laughter.

“The All-Powerful Tumble Dryers!”

“The Detergent Deities!”

The last name sent Amy and her friend onto the floor with laughter, the thought of these tiny pathetic seeming creatures taking over the world with silly hats made from missing odd socks simply too much for Amy to try to take seriously anymore. They continued to laugh for more time than Amy would later admit, before eventually calming down and standing again with the occasional giggle.

The tiny imperious voice sighed. “You’re right.”

“Eh?” the woman asked.

“You’re right. Nobody would take us seriously. The whole thing was silly.” It sounded so dejected that Amy was almost tempted to feel sorry for it.

“So...does that mean…?” Amy implied the obvious question.

“Yeah, yeah, sure, whatever,” the voice didn’t even try to sound impressive anymore. “We’ll think of something else. You...have your planet for yourselves, it’s not even that great anyway. Come on people, let’s pack it up.”

The sounds of machines shutting down and objects being moved around sounded over the speakers that Amy still hadn’t spotted the location of. She and her friend listened as the Laudrians packed up and started to leave. Amy distinctly heard a different but no less squeaky voice mutter “I said it was a bad idea from the start, but _nooooooo_ ” to nobody in particular.

Amy heard a button being pressed and her vision was filled with light. When it faded and she opened her eyes again, she and her friend were back in the still empty launderette. Amy wandered over to the washing machine that had started it all and examined it. No hole in the back. A totally normal washing machine again.

She turned to the mysterious woman.

“Did...did we just fight off an alien invasion by making fun of them?”

The woman winked at her. “Amy Pond, I believe we just did.”

“By the way Doctor, I like your new coat.”

“Thanks!” she beamed, her smile lighting up her entire face. “It has so many pockets!”

It was Amy’s turn to smile and wink at her now.

“Hmm? What’s that...oh,” her smile disappeared. “Oh. Whoops.”

“It was kind of obvious, Doctor,” Amy said, and threw herself into a hug with the new Doctor. “Why didn’t you say it was you? It’s been way too long!”

“I, um, I didn’t, I mean, I wanted to, I mean, I, um,” the Doctor stammered before sighing and giving up. “I didn’t want to get you involved. I knew there was something bad going on, the TARDIS detected the buildup of fabrisofonium, but I didn’t know if it would be dangerous. Plus, I’m going to see you again quite soon in the body you first met me and _wow_ I should not have told you that.”

Amy’s eyebrows perked up at that.

“Please don’t tell him about me,” the Doctor pleaded. “It would be very embarrassing, and also it might make history explode.”

“Of course I won’t, Doctor,” she promised. “You know you’re always welcome to come visit. I mean, as long as you call ahead first.”

“I know,” the Doctor smiled, but the smile was wistful, like she knew something she wasn’t saying. Amy was about to push further, find out what she wasn’t saying, but then she caught a look in the Doctor’s eye. An infinity of sadness swam within, a swarm of sorrows far beyond counting that threatened to drown the blonde woman who suddenly looked very small, but even deeper within, the smallest yet most eternally unbreakable glimmer of hope. Amy decided not to push it. The Doctor clearly didn’t want to talk about whatever was upsetting her, and Amy may have been better off not knowing.

“I wasn’t always the best to you,” the Doctor continued finally. “But I will always count you among my friends Amy.”

“I wasn’t always the best to you either,” Amy admitted. “But we’ve travelled. We’ve grown. We’ve changed. You’ve changed rather a lot.”

The forlorn look was gone and that brilliant smile was back. “Oh, you noticed?”

“It’s kind of hard to miss,” Amy laughed.

“How do you like it?” the Doctor asked.

“Oh, a lot,” Amy winked in a mockingly flirtatious manner. “Very sexy.”

The Doctor laughed somewhat nervously, then realised that Amy wasn’t serious and pulled her into another hug which Amy welcomed.

“Do you wanna come home for dinner?” Amy asked. “Rory would be over the moon to see you.”

“Oh, I’d love to, but I need to get back to my fam,” the Doctor responded.

“”Fam”?” Amy inquired, unable to come to terms with the emotions hearing the Doctor say that word made her feel. It somehow suited the Doctor to say it, and at the same time felt utterly wrong.

“Yeah, I’ve left them on Skonnos to enjoy the party, but things are probably gonna turn violent pretty soon,” she shrugged. “It’s Skonnos, it always does.”

Amy felt a little disappointed, but she understood. Trying to get the Doctor to stay still was an impossible task.

“Well, maybe next time,” was the answer she settled on.

“Yeah, next time,” the Doctor said. “I’ll see you soon, Amy Pond.”

“I’ll see you soon, Doctor.”

The Doctor waved jauntily, turned, and left through the door, crossing the street and entering the big blue box that Amy only just noticed was there. As it faded from sight with a loud, wheezing, groaning noise, Amy was filled with at once a sense of foreboding, and yet warmth. Somehow she doubted she would ever see this particular Doctor again. But no matter what happened, she would still have that memory. And one hell of a tale to tell Rory when she got home.


End file.
